Current health and usage monitoring systems for helicopters require aircraft gross weight and center of gravity location data to accurately calculate estimates on fatigue damage accumulation. Such data is initially entered manually into the monitoring system by the helicopter pilot and/or maintainer. It is therefore an important object of the present invention to eliminate the need for such manual entry of gross weight and center of gravity location data in helicopter health and usage monitoring systems to improve its efficiency as well as to reduce human error.
The gross weight and center of gravity location may also form some of the parameter input data associated with the neural network systems disclosed in the aforementioned related copending applications, so as to streamline the low airspeed prediction process associated therewith as an additional object of the present invention.